A photo postcard of a German trench view of barbed wire and a dead patrol. Dated February 22, 1916, and field postmarked the next day, the message is from a soldier to his uncle, and reads in part, 'yesterday we heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting . . . Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon . . . the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols . . .' (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust.) Evidently the author safely reached the French trench line.
Reverse:France Feb 22 1916 - Dear Uncle, yesterday we have heard that 4 fortresses of Verdun were taken. This have been a lot of shooting ... Maybe this is the end of Verdun and peace will come soon ... the barbed wire on the other side of the card is French. You can see dead patrols ... (Translation from the German courtesy Thomas Faust (Ebay's Urfaust).)
"Of those comrades who departed for the West hardly one has stayed alive. There were a few great characters among them who I would gladly have met up with again. I can still picture them at the station, waving from the departing train. 'Pity that you can't come with us!' shouted Erichson, the Mecklenburger who with Wurche and me had formed the third leaf of the clover in the command of the 9th company at Augustovo. Now he lies buried before Verdun. Had he guessed that we would shortly be part of the assaults on Tarnopol and Riga, he would probably have stayed with us. . . . I am once more thankful for my balanced faith, which has never been seriously shaken. Do not suppose that I believe myself to be preserved and protected to the prejudice of others — but I have the tranquil, inner knowledge that everything that happens and can happen to me is part of a living development over which nothing dead has any power."
Excerpt from an October 16, 1917 letter by German writer and officer Walter Flex to his family, written on the last day of his life. Flex took part in Operation Albion against Russia in the Baltic Sea and its coast including the port of Riga. He was shot and killed on the island of Ösel now, in 2017, Saaremaa, Estonia. 'Wurche' was Ernst Wurche, the subject of Flex's novella 'A Wanderer Between Two Worlds.' Augustovo and Tarnopol, Poland, were then in Russian Poland, east of Warsaw.
The Lost Voices of World War I, An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights by Tim Cross, page 186, copyright © 1989 by The University of Iowa, publisher: University of Iowa Press, publication date: 1989
1917-10-16, 1917, October, Flex, Walter Flex, Operation Albion, German dead, Verdun barbed wire, barbed wire dead
